Finding Love at the Laundromat? You’ve Got to be Kidding Me

We’ve all seen the commercials, the sitcom situations and the movie scenes – boy meets girl (or girl meets boy) boy has trouble sorting out his whites and his colours, girl helps, boy lends girl fabric softener and next thing you know they are married with 2.3 children. From The Big Bang Theory to My Beautiful Laundrette (which was actually about two lovely men falling for each other while running a laundromat) popular culture seems to equate laundry and love. I don’t think that the people who write these scenes have ever had to use a laundromat, at least they’ve never had to use any laundromat I’ve been to.

Rather than a singles club where even if you go home empty handed you’ve still gotten something accomplished it’s a jam packed maze of sweaty people (do air conditioned laundromats even exist?) impatiently jockeying for washers and dryers already agitated that they are losing half a day of their lives to clean their clothing. Rather than chatting up that person sitting next to you, you’re paying half-attention to a book, listening to an iPod and praying that no one notices that your underpants have made it to the front window of the side load dryer. Even if you were single and on the hunt for future prospects honestly what are the odds that you’ll find someone that piques your interest while they are doing their laundry. Contrary to what television would imply people do not dress up to do their laundry. What do you think people who are on their emergency clothes, frazzled by the manual labour required and who likely are waiting until AFTER their laundry is done to shower look like? If you’re having a hard time visualizing – it’s a cross between the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Married With Children and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (minus the good). In fact if you already had taken a fancy to someone (say he or she was in a class of yours at school or lived down the street but you had never had the chance to talk) seeing them in the laundromat could quite possibly put you off.

I should probably have put this as a disclaimer up front: I do not go to the laundromat in an attempt to find love so these aren’t the ramblings of a customer who feels they’ve been falsely advertised to. I go to the laundromat, begrudgingly, because it’s cheaper than buying new pants every week. The point is that’s why everyone else goes too. It’s time the media cleaned up its presentation of the laundromat and recognized that doing your delicates is a lot more like this…

… than this.

And I will bet a pocket full of quarters that doing your laundry will never be like this:

De-stable-izing Modern Relationships

I’m not sure whether this is just something that occurs among my groups of friends or it’s a generational thing more generally, but I’ve noticed a peculiar trend in Gen Y romance – no one ever really breaks up. Sure couples split and the individuals go on to date other people, but the old relationship is always lurking in the shadows.

It’s not just a case of a couple, or even multiple couples, splitting up and getting back together with each other. We all know couples like that and most of them have been that way since middle school. This is something different. That the old relationship has never truly finished doesn’t prevent one of the partners from going out and starting a new relationship with someone else and never quite finishing that one completely either.

What happens is over time rather than having one great overcome-all-the-odds-romantic-comedy relationship, is that individuals build up what can be considered a stable of romantic partners. Not too many – two or three, maybe even four (anything above that is starting to get slutty), but a few that can be picked from to suit one’s needs at the time. It’s like how a horse farmer might have a horse for show, a horse for working, one for racing and one for jumping. (Sorry for the length of that description of horse talents I needed to avoid saying ‘one for riding’ as that would likely have been interpreted as much less PG than I intended)

So, instead of one great love, it is entirely possible that someone may love multiple people at the same time. The strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes of each partner are known and can be accounted and compensated for. These relationships prove true the old adage of ‘better the scary you do know than the scary you don’t know’. While this approach to relationships seems, for lack of a better word, efficient, I can’t help but wonder what the long term consequences of this may be.

I don’t predict the laws on bigamy to be changed anytime soon, so does this mean that there is a whole segment of society that will never get married or ‘settle down’ in the traditional sense? Is this settling even important? Will this inability to make a firm commitment begin to permeate other areas of life – friendships (fair-weather friends to become the only kind of friends?), jobs, location. Will knowing that you have other more suitable options ready as soon as something fails to suit our immediate needs sabotage our future and turn people into total flakes?

I really hope not. There’s a lot to be said in favour of commitment and loyalty, of knowing where you stand with other people. I still think people are happier when they don’t need to constantly worry about becoming just another horse in the stable.